This increase in the number of wholesale partners in Australia will provide greater access to the benefits of the public cloud for all partners as well as delivering some new scenarios for the use of Microsoft Azure.

This expansion builds on the great progress in the CSP program over the last 12 months. As of today, there are hundreds of partners transacting across our current Indirect Partners Ingram Micro and rhipe and that continues to grow every month as partners see the benefits of building annuity revenue through monthly billing of Cloud Services.

We’re extremely pleased with the strong progress we have made together in partnership with both Ingram and rhipe and look forward to continued growth in the next 12 months. I’m also thrilled with many of the individual partner stories Ingram and rhipe are enabling.

For example, Harbour IT have 52 Microsoft SPLA customers, with over 15,000 users. Since joining the CSP program through rhipe, Harbour IT’s net new customers has grown by 28 percent. Harbour IT have also taken advantage of rhipe’s ‘Marketing-as-a-Service’ offering to help drive customer uptake and generate new leads. rhipe’s overall net-new partner growth from CSP is 42%.

For James, Blair and Elliot Munro, cloud is a family affair and business is booming. Working with Ingram Micro from a CSP perspective, GCITS has seen a revenue boost of over 300% from its own IP.

Expanding with new Indirect CSP Partners

Each of the new partners has been named because of their passionate belief in the benefits of the cloud. We plan to expand our CSP wholesale capacity and intend to appoint:

Two Mainstream Indirect Partners who are expected to offer multiple Microsoft Cloud workloads at scale; Dicker Data and Synnex.

Dicker Data is already a top performing CSP Indirect Partner in New Zealand and boasts a strong reach across Australian reseller partners. Ranging from SMB through to mid-market and enterprise resellers, Dicker Data’s extensive partner base cover all major industry verticals from education, government to financial services, legal and agriculture and thus are a natural fit for our program.

The company has a dedicated configuration centre located at their Sydney head-office in Kurnell that is staffed by dedicated engineers, many of which hold current Microsoft certifications.

Synnex is already a Surface and Volume Licensing distribution partner and we intend to build on this relationship by appointing the company as a CSP partner. They are one of the largest ICT distributors in Australia, with a strong presence globally.

Over the last year, we have also seen incredible demand for Microsoft Azure via our CSP program. Over half of our enterprise customers are using Microsoft Azure and we have witnessed extraordinary level of innovation and creative evolution in the cloud from industry disruptors, with 40% of Azure usage coming from small & medium business, ISVs and start-ups.

Distribution Central will focus on the mid-market space and specialise in hybrid cloud scenarios. Their CloudSelect platform offers a fully automated aggregation, integration and customisation point for both cloud and other ICT services with integrated billing, delivering an outstanding user experience that makes the delivery of cloud products and services easy and simple. CloudSelect is also available white labelled for their channel partners and we see this as key differentiator to help drive demand for Microsoft Azure.

And Avnet’smulti-channel cloud commerce platform offers an aggregated billing platform and the Avnet Cloud Marketplace can be white-labelled for partners. We see great opportunity for Avnet to showcase their strength in IoT, Analytics and Security.

Finally, after being appointed as a CSP Direct Partner in November to sell to end-customers, SaasPlazawill also now be able to sell through a partner channel as a CSP Indirect Partner.

SaasPlaza enables partners and customers to easily move Dynamics workloads like AX, CRM and NAV to the Azure cloud and already has extensive Microsoft Dynamics engineering and support capability. We see an opportunity for SaasPlaza to work with the broader Dynamics partner community to bring their solutions to Azure by becoming a CSP Indirect Partner.

Today’s announcement is testament to the channel capability we have built and that demand is strong. Over the coming months each of the partners will share more details as they gear up for launch.

Congratulations to our seven Indirect CSP Partners!

Phil.

For more information about the upcoming Australian Partner Conference visit here.